OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Selfie Taking with Facial Expression Recognition Using Omni-directional Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent studies have shown that visually impaired people have desires to take selfies in the same way as sighted people do to record their photos and share them with others. Although support applications using sound and vibration have been developed to help visually impaired people take selfies using smartphone cameras, it is still difficult to capture everyone in the angle of view, and it is also difficult to confirm that they all have good expressions in the photo. To mitigate these issues, we propose a method to take selfies with multiple people using an omni-directional camera. Specifically, a user takes a few seconds of video with an omni-directional camera, followed by face detection on all frames. The proposed method then eliminates false face detections and complements undetected ones considering the consistency across all frames. After performing facial expression recognition on all the frames, the proposed method finally extracts the frame in which the participants are happiest, and generates a perspective projection image in which all the participants are in the angle of view from the omni-directional frame. In experiments, we use several scenes with different number of people taken to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Wrangling Data Issues to be Wrangled: Literature Review, Taxonomy, and Industry Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Data quality is vital for user experience in products reliant on data. As solutions for data quality problems, researchers have developed various taxonomies for different types of issues. However, although some of the existing taxonomies are near-comprehensive, the over-complexity has limited their actionability in data issue solution development. Hence, recent researchers issued new sets of data issue categories that are more concise for better usability. Although more concise, modern data issue labeling's over-catering to the solution systems may sometimes cause the taxonomy to be not mutually exclusive. Consequently, different categories sometimes overlap in determining the issue types, or the same categories share different definitions across research. This hinders solution development and confounds issue detection. Therefore, based on observations from a literature review and feedback from our industry partner, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of data quality issues from two distinct dimensions: the attribute dimension represents the intrinsic characteristics and the outcome dimension that indicates the manifestation of the issues. With the categories redefined, we labeled the reported data issues in our industry partner's data warehouse. The labeled issues provide us with a general idea of the distributions of each type of problem and which types of issues require the most effort and care to deal with. Our work aims to address a widely generalizable taxonomy rule in modern data quality issue engineering and helps practitioners and researchers understand their data issues and estimate the efforts required for issue fixing.
Risk Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving Systems based on Causal Bayesian Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Advancements in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) have brought significant benefits, but also raised concerns regarding their safety. Virtual tests are common practices to ensure the safety of ADS because they are more efficient and safer compared to field operational tests. However, capturing the complex dynamics of real-world driving environments and effectively generating risk scenarios for testing is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm shift towards utilizing Causal Bayesian Networks (CBN) for scenario generation in ADS. The CBN is built and validated using Maryland accident data, providing a deeper insight into the myriad factors influencing autonomous driving behaviors. Based on the constructed CBN, we propose an algorithm that significantly enhances the process of risk scenario generation, leading to more effective and safer ADS. An end-to-end testing framework for ADS is established utilizing the CARLA simulator. Through experiments, we successfully generated 89 high-risk scenarios from 5 seed scenarios, outperforming baseline methods in terms of time and iterations required.
A Study on Developer Behaviors for Validating and Repairing LLM-Generated Code Using Eye Tracking and IDE Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing use of large language model (LLM)-powered code generation tools, such as GitHub Copilot, is transforming software engineering practices. This paper investigates how developers validate and repair code generated by Copilot and examines the impact of code provenance awareness during these processes. We conducted a lab study with 28 participants, who were tasked with validating and repairing Copilot-generated code in three software projects. Participants were randomly divided into two groups: one informed about the provenance of LLM-generated code and the other not. We collected data on IDE interactions, eye-tracking, cognitive workload assessments, and conducted semi-structured interviews. Our results indicate that, without explicit information, developers often fail to identify the LLM origin of the code. Developers generally employ similar validation and repair strategies for LLM-generated code, but exhibit behaviors such as frequent switching between code and comments, different attentional focus, and a tendency to delete and rewrite code. Being aware of the code's provenance led to improved performance, increased search efforts, more frequent Copilot usage, and higher cognitive workload. These findings enhance our understanding of how developers interact with LLM-generated code and carry implications for designing tools that facilitate effective human-LLM collaboration in software development.
From Orthogonality to Dependency: Learning Disentangled Representation for Multi-Modal Time-Series Sensing Signals
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Existing methods for multi-modal time series representation learning aim to disentangle the modality-shared and modality-specific latent variables. Although achieving notable performances on downstream tasks, they usually assume an orthogonal latent space. However, the modality-specific and modality-shared latent variables might be dependent on real-world scenarios. Therefore, we propose a general generation process, where the modality-shared and modality-specific latent variables are dependent, and further develop a \textbf{M}ulti-mod\textbf{A}l \textbf{TE}mporal Disentanglement (\textbf{MATE}) model. Specifically, our \textbf{MATE} model is built on a temporally variational inference architecture with the modality-shared and modality-specific prior networks for the disentanglement of latent variables. Furthermore, we establish identifiability results to show that the extracted representation is disentangled. More specifically, we first achieve the subspace identifiability for modality-shared and modality-specific latent variables by leveraging the pairing of multi-modal data. Then we establish the component-wise identifiability of modality-specific latent variables by employing sufficient changes of historical latent variables. Extensive experimental studies on multi-modal sensors, human activity recognition, and healthcare datasets show a general improvement in different downstream tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in real-world scenarios.
Deep-PE: A Learning-Based Pose Evaluator for Point Cloud Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the realm of point cloud registration, the most prevalent pose evaluation approaches are statistics-based, identifying the optimal transformation by maximizing the number of consistent correspondences. However, registration recall decreases significantly when point clouds exhibit a low overlap rate, despite efforts in designing feature descriptors and establishing correspondences. In this paper, we introduce Deep-PE, a lightweight, learning-based pose evaluator designed to enhance the accuracy of pose selection, especially in challenging point cloud scenarios with low overlap. Our network incorporates a Pose-Aware Attention (PAA) module to simulate and learn the alignment status of point clouds under various candidate poses, alongside a Pose Confidence Prediction (PCP) module that predicts the likelihood of successful registration. These two modules facilitate the learning of both local and global alignment priors. Extensive tests across multiple benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of Deep-PE. Notably, on 3DLoMatch with a low overlap rate, Deep-PE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by at least 8% and 11% in registration recall under handcrafted FPFH and learning-based FCGF descriptors, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to utilize deep learning to select the optimal pose without the explicit need for input correspondences.
Enhancing Near OOD Detection in Prompt Learning: Maximum Gains, Minimal Costs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Prompt learning has shown to be an efficient and effective fine-tuning method for vision-language models like CLIP. While numerous studies have focused on the generalisation of these models in few-shot classification, their capability in near out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has been overlooked. A few recent works have highlighted the promising performance of prompt learning in far OOD detection. However, the more challenging task of few-shot near OOD detection has not yet been addressed. In this study, we investigate the near OOD detection capabilities of prompt learning models and observe that commonly used OOD scores have limited performance in near OOD detection. To enhance the performance, we propose a fast and simple post-hoc method that complements existing logit-based scores, improving near OOD detection AUROC by up to 11.67% with minimal computational cost. Our method can be easily applied to any prompt learning model without change in architecture or re-training the models. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across 13 datasets and 8 models demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of our method.
SNOBERT: A Benchmark for clinical notes entity linking in the SNOMED CT clinical terminology
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The extraction and analysis of insights from medical data, primarily stored in free-text formats by healthcare workers, presents significant challenges due to its unstructured nature. Medical coding, a crucial process in healthcare, remains minimally automated due to the complexity of medical ontologies and restricted access to medical texts for training Natural Language Processing models. In this paper, we proposed a method, "SNOBERT," of linking text spans in clinical notes to specific concepts in the SNOMED CT using BERT-based models. The method consists of two stages: candidate selection and candidate matching. The models were trained on one of the largest publicly available dataset of labeled clinical notes. SNOBERT outperforms other classical methods based on deep learning, as confirmed by the results of a challenge in which it was applied.
Dual-Adapter: Training-free Dual Adaptation for Few-shot Out-of-Distribution Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We study the problem of few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, which aims to detect OOD samples from unseen categories during inference time with only a few labeled in-domain (ID) samples. Existing methods mainly focus on training task-aware prompts for OOD detection. However, training on few-shot data may cause severe overfitting and textual prompts alone may not be enough for effective detection. To tackle these problems, we propose a prior-based Training-free Dual Adaptation method (Dual-Adapter) to detect OOD samples from both textual and visual perspectives. Specifically, Dual-Adapter first extracts the most significant channels as positive features and designates the remaining less relevant channels as negative features. Then, it constructs both a positive adapter and a negative adapter from a dual perspective, thereby better leveraging previously outlooked or interfering features in the training dataset. In this way, Dual-Adapter can inherit the advantages of CLIP not having to train, but also excels in distinguishing between ID and OOD samples. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of Dual-Adapter.
Bi-reachability in Petri nets with data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate Petri nets with data, an extension of plain Petri nets where tokens carry values from an infinite data domain, and executability of transitions is conditioned by equalities between data values. We provide a decision procedure for the bi-reachability problem: given a Petri net and its two configurations, we ask if each of the configurations is reachable from the other. This pushes forward the decidability borderline, as the bi-reachability problem subsumes the coverability problem (which is known to be decidable) and is subsumed by the reachability problem (whose decidability status is unknown).
Vision Language Models for Spreadsheet Understanding: Challenges and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores capabilities of Vision Language Models on spreadsheet comprehension. We propose three self-supervised challenges with corresponding evaluation metrics to comprehensively evaluate VLMs on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), spatial perception, and visual format recognition. Additionally, we utilize the spreadsheet table detection task to assess the overall performance of VLMs by integrating these challenges. To probe VLMs more finely, we propose three spreadsheet-to-image settings: column width adjustment, style change, and address augmentation. We propose variants of prompts to address the above tasks in different settings. Notably, to leverage the strengths of VLMs in understanding text rather than two-dimensional positioning, we propose to decode cell values on the four boundaries of the table in spreadsheet boundary detection. Our findings reveal that VLMs demonstrate promising OCR capabilities but produce unsatisfactory results due to cell omission and misalignment, and they notably exhibit insufficient spatial and format recognition skills, motivating future work to enhance VLMs' spreadsheet data comprehension capabilities using our methods to generate extensive spreadsheet-image pairs in various settings.
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Enhanced PPO for Safe Mobile Robot Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Collision-free motion is essential for mobile robots. Most approaches to collision-free and efficient navigation with wheeled robots require parameter tuning by experts to obtain good navigation behavior. This study investigates the application of deep reinforcement learning to train a mobile robot for autonomous navigation in a complex environment. The robot utilizes LiDAR sensor data and a deep neural network to generate control signals guiding it toward a specified target while avoiding obstacles. We employ two reinforcement learning algorithms in the Gazebo simulation environment: Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient and proximal policy optimization. The study introduces an enhanced neural network structure in the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm to boost performance, accompanied by a well-designed reward function to improve algorithm efficacy. Experimental results conducted in both obstacle and obstacle-free environments underscore the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This research significantly contributes to the advancement of autonomous robotics in complex environments through the application of deep reinforcement learning.
Picturing Ambiguity: A Visual Twist on the Winograd Schema Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in tasks like the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), showcasing advanced textual common-sense reasoning. However, applying this reasoning to multimodal domains, where understanding text and images together is essential, remains a substantial challenge. To address this, we introduce WinoVis, a novel dataset specifically designed to probe text-to-image models on pronoun disambiguation within multimodal contexts. Utilizing GPT-4 for prompt generation and Diffusion Attentive Attribution Maps (DAAM) for heatmap analysis, we propose a novel evaluation framework that isolates the models' ability in pronoun disambiguation from other visual processing challenges. Evaluation of successive model versions reveals that, despite incremental advancements, Stable Diffusion 2.0 achieves a precision of 56.7% on WinoVis, only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further error analysis identifies important areas for future research aimed at advancing text-to-image models in their ability to interpret and interact with the complex visual world.
ModelLock: Locking Your Model With a Spell
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a novel model protection paradigm ModelLock that locks (destroys) the performance of a model on normal clean data so as to make it unusable or unextractable without the right key. Specifically, we proposed a diffusion-based framework dubbed ModelLock that explores text-guided image editing to transform the training data into unique styles or add new objects in the background. A model finetuned on this edited dataset will be locked and can only be unlocked by the key prompt, i.e., the text prompt used to transform the data. We conduct extensive experiments on both image classification and segmentation tasks, and show that 1) ModelLock can effectively lock the finetuned models without significantly reducing the expected performance, and more importantly, 2) the locked model cannot be easily unlocked without knowing both the key prompt and the diffusion model. Our work opens up a new direction for intellectual property protection of private models.
Generation of synthetic data using breast cancer dataset and classification with resnet18
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Since technology is advancing so quickly in the modern era of information, data is becoming an essential resource in many fields. Correct data collection, organization, and analysis make it a potent tool for successful decision-making, process improvement, and success across a wide range of sectors. Synthetic data is required for a number of reasons, including the constraints of real data, the expense of collecting labeled data, and privacy and security problems in specific situations and domains. For a variety of reasons, including security, ethics, legal restrictions, sensitivity and privacy issues, and ethics, synthetic data is a valuable tool, particularly in the health sector. A deep learning model called GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) has been developed with the intention of generating synthetic data. In this study, the Breast Histopathology dataset was used to generate malignant and negatively labeled synthetic patch images using MSG-GAN (Multi-Scale Gradients for Generative Adversarial Networks), a form of GAN, to aid in cancer identification. After that, the ResNet18 model was used to classify both synthetic and real data via Transfer Learning. Following the investigation, an attempt was made to ascertain whether the synthetic images behaved like the real data or if they are comparable to the original data.
A Classifier-Free Incremental Learning Framework for Scalable Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Current methods for developing foundation models in medical image segmentation rely on two primary assumptions: a fixed set of classes and the immediate availability of a substantial and diverse training dataset. However, this can be impractical due to the evolving nature of imaging technology and patient demographics, as well as labor-intensive data curation, limiting their practical applicability and scalability. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel segmentation paradigm enabling the segmentation of a variable number of classes within a single classifier-free network, featuring an architecture independent of class number. This network is trained using contrastive learning and produces discriminative feature representations that facilitate straightforward interpretation. Additionally, we integrate this strategy into a knowledge distillation-based incremental learning framework, facilitating the gradual assimilation of new information from non-stationary data streams while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Our approach provides a unified solution for tackling both class- and domain-incremental learning scenarios. We demonstrate the flexibility of our method in handling varying class numbers within a unified network and its capacity for incremental learning. Experimental results on an incompletely annotated, multi-modal, multi-source dataset for medical image segmentation underscore its superiority over state-of-the-art alternative approaches.
A Strong Direct Sum Theorem for Distributional Query Complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

Consider the expected query complexity of computing the $k$-fold direct product $f^{\otimes k}$ of a function $f$ to error $\varepsilon$ with respect to a distribution $μ^k$. One strategy is to sequentially compute each of the $k$ copies to error $\varepsilon/k$ with respect to $μ$ and apply the union bound. We prove a strong direct sum theorem showing that this naive strategy is essentially optimal. In particular, computing a direct product necessitates a blowup in both query complexity and error. Strong direct sum theorems contrast with results that only show a blowup in query complexity or error but not both. There has been a long line of such results for distributional query complexity, dating back to (Impagliazzo, Raz, Wigderson 1994) and (Nisan, Rudich, Saks 1994), but a strong direct sum theorem had been elusive. A key idea in our work is the first use of the Hardcore Theorem (Impagliazzo 1995) in the context of query complexity. We prove a new "resilience lemma" that accompanies it, showing that the hardcore of $f^{\otimes k}$ is likely to remain dense under arbitrary partitions of the input space.
How Many Matrices Should I Prepare To Polarize Channels Optimally Fast?
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Polar codes that approach capacity at a near-optimal speed, namely with scaling exponents close to $2$, have been shown possible for $q$-ary erasure channels (Pfister and Urbanke), the BEC (Fazeli, Hassani, Mondelli, and Vardy), all BMS channels (Guruswami, Riazanov, and Ye), and all DMCs (Wang and Duursma). There is, nevertheless, a subtlety separating the last two papers from the first two, namely the usage of multiple dynamic kernels in the polarization process, which leads to increased complexity and fewer opportunities to hardware-accelerate. This paper clarifies this subtlety, providing a trade-off between the number of kernels in the construction and the scaling exponent. We show that the number of kernels can be bounded by $O(\ell^{3/μ-1})$ where $μ$ is the targeted scaling exponent and $\ell$ is the kernel size. In particular, if one settles for scaling exponent approaching $3$, a single kernel suffices, and to approach the optimal scaling exponent of $2$, about $O(\sqrt{\ell})$ kernels suffice.